Best places in the United States to raise a family

It’s not easy raising a family these days. Parents are still grappling with covid and formula shortages, along with the lingering grief and anxiety of a growing number of school shootings.

Decades after the post-war baby boom, the United States could be looking at a baby bust, according to the Pew Research Center. Birth rate in the United States fall during the pandemic, and were already down before that.

According to a Research bench survey in 2021. The reason? About 56% said they just didn’t want to, and the rest cited other reasons, including medical, (19%) financial, (17%) not having a partner, (15%) their age, (10%) the state of the world (9%) and climate change (5%).

Other challenges include the childcare costswhich has increased 41% since 2020, with families spending up to 20% of their wages, Fortune reports, and more than half of all US residents live in a babysitting desertwhere the need far exceeds the supply, according to the Center for American Progress.

The maternal mortality rate in the United States is much worse than in other industrialized countries, with a rate almost three times that of France, the country with the second highest rate.

Then there is college. The average college cost in the United States is $35,331 per student per year, including books, supplies, and living expenses. In 1963, the annual cost of tuition at a public four-year college was $243, the equivalent today of $2,207 after adjusting for inflation, a 324% increase, adjusted for inflation.

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So anyone looking to raise a family these days might want to do whatever they can to put the odds in their favor. While big cities can be expensive, the suburbs aren’t always the ideal places to live for everyone, either. Cities can be fun, educational, and thriving for families, and many towns and cities are working to improve their family friendliness.

To find the best places for families, personal finance site WalletHub compared 182 U.S. cities — including the 150 most populous U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populous cities in each state — across 46 metrics that take into account essential family dynamics, such as the cost of housing, the quality of local school and health systems, and opportunities for entertainment and recreation.

The top city is Fremont, Calif., which also ranks No. 1 for health and safety and for socioeconomics, as well as second for education and childcare. And despite being in the Bay Area, Fremont is still in the top 30 for affordability.

The cities with the most family fun are Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The highest ranked city for education and child care is South Burlington, Vt. The most affordable city is Overland Park, Kan., which ranks second overall.

WalletHub’s top categories for ranking were:

Family fun – this includes weather, walking, share of families with young children and number of fun things like parks, playgrounds, sports, ice rinks and mini golf.
Health and Safety, which includes air and water quality, crime rates, homelessness rate, pedestrian and driver fatalities, crime rates, hospital rankings, pediatricians by capita and vaccination rates
Education and child care, which includes the quality of school systems, high school graduation rates, child care costs, parental leave policies, and summer learning opportunities
Affordability, which includes median family incomes, cost of living and housing costs
Socio-economics, which includes divorce rates, the proportion of two-parent families, the number of families living in poverty, and employment and debt rates.

Here are the best cities for families.